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GQ's 25th anniversary cover star: Rihanna by Damien Hirst

He is the world's most controversial living artist. She is one of the world's most successful pop icons. To celebrate British GQ's 25th anniversary, these two creative firebrands embarked on an art project the like of which has never been seen before. Jonathan Heaf witnessed the making of a masterpiece

Two tricked-out Escalade SUVs - gleaming chrome rims, panel-work as patent as an oil slick, thick-tinted pap-proof windows - park up like intergalactic squad cars, sitting motionless bar the gentle hum of the V8 engines keeping their precious cargo on icy air inside. One vehicle is at the far curb opposite a warehouse complex, the other has double-parked in the middle of the street - the rest of New York City, it seems, can wait in the rear-view mirror. Welcome to "new" Brooklyn - the latest NYC suburb to get gentrified into yet another creative hub for lower-middle-class hipster professional cupcake obsessives. It's not yet noon, and the assortment of gathered -mustachioed prop stylists, urbane tailors, tattoo-adorned microbrewery owners and (seemingly) endless extras from Girls hanging outside Fast Ashleys Studio peer out from under their Moscot shades for a beat, clock the hip-hop caravan, and promptly continue to emit a snarling ennui. (I guess it takes a lot to impress a generation that popularised Crocs, Grumpy Cat, and the Cronut.) From inside one of the vehicles a deep, slow bassline throbs like the murmurings of an evil robot heart.

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A moment melts by. Maybe two. The right-hand passenger door of the car parked across both lanes of traffic cracks open like a fridge freezer, the broken rubber seal allowing the cold air to flood over the baked concrete. A flip-flopped foot hits the tarmac.

On a right ankle there's a glimpse of a tattooed eagle, its wings outstretched into the shape of a handgun. What follows is a long, slender brown leg, then another, and then a pair of denim cut-offs riding so high that all the young fathers within close proximity immediately fear for the morals of their impressionable first-born daughters. Next, there's a hat. A goofy little hat! Not a showbiz trilby, the sort an overpaid stylist gives to a client to wear while transferring through LAX on the way to the Meadows Clinic, but a bucket hat - a "Reni" hat. To make the unsexiest item of clothing ever sexy? Now, that's quite something. The wearer skips past all the young dudes - now agog - simultaneously posting a little wave the way of the attending paparazzi. There's a pop of her megawatt smile; the dots of her pupils swimming in pools of milky-green ointment like wild pearls in fresh rock oysters. Once inside, her crew welcomes her with hugs, hand claps and butt slaps. Her crew, unsurprisingly, rolls very, very tight. When she talks, she purrs, her thick Barbadian accent curving and stretching her vowels like bowed palms in a sea breeze. She's a siren. Rihanna has arrived. In fact, she's two minutes early. "Do you want to see my fangs?" Damien Hirst - artist, icon, shit-stirrer, prankster, cow-slicer, death-dealer, national treasure, YouTube addict, southwest hustler, modern conceptualist, rude boy, rich-lister, totem of everything British contemporary art has become, storyteller, genius, ex-smoker, all-agitator and enthusiastic Red Bull drinker - is standing in one corner, dressed in a plain grey T-shirt, dark-blue jeans and bright-white Nike trainers, a sanding tool in one hand and a long, pink, rubber prosthetic forked tongue in the other, smiling ever so sweetly.

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Over the next six hours, like some sort of deranged Kubrickian wet dream, the two creative firebrands will collaborate on an art project that will see Hirst play tempter to Rihanna's Eve. They will rationalise, argue, debate and execute a seed of an idea that started with a text message two months ago, very nearly didn't happen, twice - Hirst to Rihanna (SMS): "I'm not doing it.";

Rihanna to Hirst (SMS): "I'm a gonna kill ya then." - and will climax with two pythons, one 4ft, one 6ft, being entwined around Rihanna's near-naked body, while several gobsmacked attendees don't know where snake ends and where pop star begins. If paradise is being blissfully unaware of your own nakedness, we'll take eternal damnation every time. Anyway, fig leaves were, like, so six millennia ago.

Science Ltd, Dudbridge, Gloucestershire, 9 September, 3.46pm

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"Nineteen-eighty-eight - that's the only date I can ever remember.

That and 1977, the year I was too young to become a punk." Damien Hirst and I are sitting in a narrow office, a white space within a white space within his echoing hanger-sized factory art park about a mile's drive from Stroud station. Hirst, the GQ Creative Director Paul Solomons, a still-life photographer and a team of snake handlers have been here since noon, positioning, cajoling and begging milk snakes, corn snakes, boa constrictors and carpet pythons to adorn themselves on a white bust so that the resulting slithering photographic crown might then be layered on to Rihanna's slit-eyed portraits captured in New York.

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Nineteen-eighty-eight was year zero for both British GQ and for Damien Hirst. The year the magazine began was the same year that Hirst curated, orchestrated and wrestled into being an exhibition in an empty building in Surrey Docks called

Freeze, displaying his very earliest work alongside other students from Goldsmiths College. The importance of Freeze - why it happened, where it happened, and all the interconnecting parties involved, from dealers to participants to commentators and critics - is now woven into the very fabric of contemporary art history. Hirst was at its core: the physical force swearing and thinking and stamping the show, the idea, the mission into existence, willing it to be noticed and seen. As Ian Jeffrey, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, noted in a documentary about the show, "Damien had the perception to go out and do something yourself.

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That in a way was the theme, the subtext of [Freeze]. Not waiting for the establishment to come to you. You did it yourself, because no one was going to help you."

In order to get those he wanted to attend Freeze, there's a story that Hirst went to pick up the likes of Nicholas Serota and Norman Rosenthal in a black cab himself, gave them the pitch en route and made them pay for the ride. Such energy, such defiance of an antiquated hierarchical protocol - the shocking obstinacy of the new - was to define not just Hirst, but an entire generation of artists later known as the YBAs. For Hirst, and many of his fellow artists involved (Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Anya Gallaccio), this sense of collective rebelliousness became their common cause, and over the next decade this spread to a wider field to include their contemporaries. This exhibition also marked a time wherein the young, chain-smoking artist came into direct contact with the business side of art - a little success, the media eye, sharking dealers, how to produce a show, how to sell work, how to make money, yet essentially how to survive as a working artist. How to live.

Run over the summer of '88 in three parts, Hirst first exhibited several nests of brightly coloured, gloss-painted boxes and finished up with a spot painting daubed onto one of the warehouse walls, before going back to finish his degree. Where did such ambition come from? "Freeze was important, of course it was. But it wasn't some calculated means of building an art empire, or a brand," Hirst reflects today. "I didn't want to be famous. Or rich. I just wanted to get on with it on my terms. It sounds really arrogant now, but it was a raw, youthful willpower back then. I'd been working as a labourer and it was there while watching all these heavy men lift bricks and eat cold stuffed ox hearts for lunch that I knew I wasn't like them. They called me Steve, for Christ's sake. I realised I was an artist and had to make it work. "Minimalism was the big thing at college: conceptual minimalism.

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I remember something of a turning point: I had a tutor who came to see me one day. I'd just done a load of new work making all these little collages. I smashed them all up and swept them into a pile on the floor in front of him. I turned and said, 'What do you think about that, then?' He replied, 'What am I supposed to think about it?' And I said, 'I've just done it. I want to know what you think?' He asked, 'Is it an art work?' I told him it was. He told me I hadn't really thought it through. I told him that was the whole point. He demanded, 'Well, how have you swept it? What sort of brush did you use? What was your goal?' He was being really awkward; I was being confrontational. In the end, he just turned to me and went, 'Look. I can tell you anything you want, but at the end of the day the only interesting people are the people who go, "F*** off. This is what I think."' And you know what? That's why I like Rihanna. She's very, 'F*** the lot of you, this is what I think.' Oh, and she's also really sexy."

Rihanna is also 25. When Robyn Rihanna Fenty first emerged onto the global scene - around 2007, when smash hit "Umbrella" sprung from her third album Good Girl Gone Bad - the singer had her people contact Hirst's people about buying a piece of art.

Rumour has it, she'd been given a Hirst by her label boss and mentor, Jay-Z, and had acquired something of a taste for it. "She arranged to come to the studio about five times, I think," remembers Hirst. "She never made it. It made me laugh, actually, because that's precisely what I used to be like back in the glory days. I just kept missing appointments; going out on Friday night and turning up to meetings on Monday morning like a tramp, still off my head. I waited a few times for her; getting a taste of my own medicine."

Just as with Freeze, it is Hirst's sheer will, a perfectionism he wears lightly rather than with arrogance, plus an innate ability to be head chef, in a metaphorical kitchen simply

rammed full of head chefs, that has propelled this

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GQ anniversary project from the beginning. No compromises; no short cuts; f*** off - this is what he thinks. For a muse, of course, you couldn't ask for much more than someone as iconic or as uninhibited or as open as Rihanna. But if modern conceptualism is about the idea becoming the machine that makes the artwork, then Hirst is the guts of that machine, the piston, the fuel and the flint.

So why Medusa? "She's badass!" Medusa or Rihanna? "Both. And I'll put her in formaldehyde because if I don't, then everyone is going to come up to me and say, 'So, why didn't you put her in formaldehyde?' So I will, just to shut them up. But I'm working on a new collection, a series called Treasures. There are some paintings of Medusa, some sculptures. The idea has an arc.

I've been working on it for about four years and it probably won't be finished for another four."

He grins. "Rihanna is bad." Bad in what sense? Badly behaved? "Yeah, bad bad. If you're a mother, she's a proper terror, isn't she? How many 14-year-old girls are smoking weed because of Rihanna? A lot. A million, maybe. But you have to admire people who lead because the politicians certainly aren't leading us anywhere.

So why not follow her? I'd rather follow Rihanna than David Cameron. She's strong and I think she's making a generation of women strong. She's an unlikely role model, yet hugely successful.

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I'll take her over anyone else for now. Frankly, I never thought she'd turn up. I'm flattered."

Damien Hirst has changed a great deal over the past 25 years, a line that, very simply, meanders from Freeze, to a shark in formaldehyde, a severed cow, a gallery owner named Larry Gagosian, a dealer named Charles Saatchi via a record-breaking auction at Sotheby's to the front cover of British GQ. "I've never had to come to terms with being a different person, I don't think," he admits. "I once said in an interview I didn't trust people who don't smoke; now I don't trust people who do. But of course I've changed. I thought I was immortal, and then you realise you're not. I used to have massive brand loyalty to smoking, for example. I would have had Silk Cut tattooed on my back. Totally into smoking fags, chaining it, and doing drugs, but then you can't handle the hangovers, can you? I think it was Bez from the Happy Mondays who once explained it to me: you're either doing it to celebrate or you're doing it to escape, and if you're not celebrating, you have to knock it on the head. So I did. You have to learn how to do everything again, everything sober. Have dinner sober, shag sober, chat up a girl sober. But dancing sober - that's the killer!"

If Hirst's reasons for being an artist haven't changed since

Freeze, the reception to - and patrons of - his art certainly have. As has the price tag. Hirst's latest commission is 14 monumental bronze sculptures that chronicle the gestation of a foetus - the final stage is a 46ft-tall statue of an anatomically correct baby boy. The piece, "The Miraculous Journey", was commissioned by the Qatar Museums Authority and reportedly cost upwards of $20m. It makes the £50,000 Saatchi paid for Hirst's stuffed tiger shark seem a pittance. "I'm coming up to 50. I started as an outsider and now I've become that thing I was kicking against all my life," he adds. "I'm sure there are loads of young artists out there thinking, 'That Damien Hirst? Mainstream bollocks!' In a way, it's reassuring." I ask whether he worries that his reputation as a flamed-out enfant terrible might skewer people's perceptions of his art? "I used to care a great deal about what younger, cool artists thought about me, but not any more. Once you become what I have become, you lose touch. And it's not about money so much as age or that fire in your belly. "Leaving Larry Gagosian [in 2012] was a major thing for me. It's changed the way I look at art and at my own art. I was always into making art that was cool with a capital 'C' and I started drifting away from that. I was scared of making the art that I wanted to make, as there was too much pressure. I was told, 'You're making too much of it,' or 'Your prices are too high.' F*** that shit! As you get older, the art has still got to be about you and sometimes you have to get a bit lost: that's part of finding your own way.

It's not just about making a couple of good artworks - the sheep, the cow, the spin paintings, the skull - it's about developing, and having a whole career and a full body of work you look at on your deathbed and be proud of." Is he proud of "For The Love Of God", his £50m diamond skull? "[It's] a strange, mesmerising object. I'm still dealing with it myself. Everything about it costs money. The materials, everything. It's in a vault in Hatton Garden. I go and just stare at it sometimes. But again, it's a development. I'm not sitting here just churning it out, whatever anyone might think.

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It's like the Beatles. It's like Rihanna."

I ask what he thinks he'll be producing in another 25 years. "I'll be outside Green Park tube doing miniatures of all my famous pieces." Hirst's entirely self-deprecating sense of humour is as much a part of his persona as his desire to move forward, or a need to cut to the very heart of any conversation. He goes on to tell an anecdote about being in a bar recently where he got talking to a woman: 21 or so, young, pretty, switched-on, worldly. "I told her I was an artist. She asked if she would know any of my work. I told her she probably would, yeah. She goes, 'Go on then, what?'